e-Commerce | Kontrary

Art You Can Understand

Amazon now offers art, and has “partnered up with over 150 galleries and art dealers across the US… The site offers over 40,000 original works of fine art, showcasing 4,500 artists. That, perhaps unsurprisingly, makes it the largest online collection of art directly available from galleries and dealers.”

Creatives and critics don’t have high hopes.

“Is Amazon Art a doomed venture? Let’s hope so,” said economist Tyler Cowen. “One enduring feature of the art world is that a given piece will sell for much more in one context rather than another… What makes Amazon work for me is simply that they sell better stuff and a wider variety at cheaper prices. Why give that formula up by treading into a market where such an approach won’t make any money? Why compete in a market where an awesomely speedy physical delivery network means next to nothing?”

Well, because art and its pricing have largely been hidden and mysterious. Any time you disintermediate the secretive layers of a market, there’s value there. Despite a slew of art startups, fine art has remained out of reach both economically and emotionally for most people. The gallery experience is less than welcoming, and its traditions are largely foreign to mainstream consumers. Buying a couch, a new TV or appliance, getting a loan from a bank, or moving across the country seem easier than buying a piece to hang on your wall.

Amazon’s art initiative makes art more accessible, the pricing more transparent and straightforward, and yes, art more mainstream. Not sure Amazon’s goal is to immediately offer consumers the best price, but rather to commoditize art in a way the everyperson can understand.

But that still leaves the question of taste. Like fashion on Amazon, Wired Opinion Editor Sonal Chokshi said the art initiative won’t work for pandering to the lowest common denominator. “If you buy that the key to doing real fashion online is more merchandizing savvy than algorithms, Amazon hasn’t nailed this… Fashion — with a capital F — is inherently exclusive. You can’t be everything to everyone. It’s as much about what you cut out as what you include,” argues Pando Daily’s Sarah Lacy. Without a strong curatorial point of view, Chokshi says, art too will fail on Amazon.

Merchandising has solely existed on Amazon in the form of bestseller lists, recommendations and reviews. Amazon isn’t the expert, the algorithimic consumer is. That could be disturbing to those with a proclivity to self-ascribe taste, but it hasn’t hurt the sale of novels and books, a similar market where curation and word-of-mouth drive our current conciousness. And as far as fashion, I may discover a great shoe on a blog, but will search for the best price on Google. Consumers have evolved enough where discovery and point-of-purchase can be several clicks apart (see: the rise of showrooming).

Worst case, however, Amazon Art adds several more chapters to the site’s catalgoue of everything, ensuring that you start and/or end every purchase on Amazon.

Why E-Commerce Needs to Stop Aggregation and Start Getting Social

Most of us would agree that the internet is biased towards social connection, yet many e-commerce or f-commerce experiences are not. In the olden days, bazaars weren’t only about consuming “stuff,” but were a social space to meet up with friends and exchange information.

Today, instead of a peer-to-peer economy, we have relationships with our brands. We don’t learn what’s happening in our world, but instead learn how much smaller the new iPad is.

The mom blogosphere in particular has risen to fill that void, up to a point. Bloggers and readers exchange ideas, rumors and facts that matter to them, but companies quickly co-opt the majority of well-intentioned blogs to sell more stuff instead of creating more social value. Ultimately, such actions have degraded blogs to what we have today: a list of product features and giveaways.

Companies do this because of their inability to embrace nuance, being solely dedicated to the dollar. You can see this play out in how companies structure themselves. Many companies create an e-commerce site that is simply an inventory list with no social value whatsoever. This means that many other companies can then take advantage of those sites because they don’t offer anything except a price on a product. So those other companies rise up another level of abstraction and become a search engine or aggregator, which creates even less value than before.

What we’re seeing now, as a result of the recession, is that you can’t just keep abstracting how you make money at a higher and higher level. Indeed, each time we distance ourselves from the most basic of human interactions – that is, a face-to-face conversation – the more dangerous it is for our economy.

Take a look at Appaloosa, a hedge fund that employs 250 people and Apple, a company that employs about 35,000 people and earned around $6 billion in 2009. “Appaloosa, the hedge fund, earned about as much as Apple in 2009 by speculating on… well, we don’t really know,” argues Jeffrey Hollender.

And many would argue it was just that kind of speculation – or abstraction – that got us into all of our financial problems in the first place.

For e-commerce and f-commerce, this means an opportunity to pivot to new models by combining commerce with community to replicate the peer-to-peer economy, where value isn’t limited to dollars and point of sale, but expands to include the concept of sharing and access just as it would in real life.

Ultimately, that is what every e-commerce site should be doing – not attempting a relationship between brand and customer, but enabling connections and conversations between customers.

Which even in this age of social media, very few companies do successfully.